There are three ways to participate.

1. Share an amazing geo/location/data visualization video or image

Geodata is often best expressed visually. Inspired by projects like Cab Spotting, Dave Imus’ The Essential Geography Of The United States Of America and Eric Fisher’s Locals and Tourists, we want your data viz videos, imagery and cartography. (Be sure that you have rights to the underlying data and that you attribute it properly.)

2. Create an interactive RFID installation

Inspired by Mediamatic, each attendee will have an RFID tag that can be paired with our conference social network. If an attendee swipes his or her tag, you’ll be able to:

• Fetch info about the owner of a swiped badge.
• Show the owner of a swiped badge where they are supposed to be next, according to their personal schedule.
• Send the owner of a swiped badge a message via the attendee directory.
• Make two owners of swiped badges contacts within the attendee directory.

3. Mini Maker Faire: Hardware project

The Where Mini Maker Faire will take place on Wednesday, April 4. We’re interested in any hardware project that is in the geo/location/sensing space, particularly ones that feature:

• Kinect/Computer Vision Arduino/Lilypad/ADK Processing for Android
• Beagle Board/Panda Board
• NFC/RFID
• Gadgeteer Wearables
• ROBOTS!!!!

Mini Maker Faire setup includes a four-inch skirted, countertop-level table, Wi-Fi and power.

Acceptances will be rolling. The deadline to get your proposal in is March 1, so apply soon. If your project is accepted for any of the above, you’ll receive a pass to Where.

Where Conference 2012 — O’Reilly’s Where Conference, being held April 2-4 in San Francisco, is where the people working on and using location technologies explore emerging trends in software development, tools, business strategies and marketing.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

Geeks like to share. At Ignite events, we’ve found that a speaker can impart a lot of information to a curious audience in just five minutes. So we went out and found 10 geeks to each share some slice of their life. The talks are going to range from life hacks and online experiments to histories of technology. They each get 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes on stage. We find that the constraints make the event a lot more energetic than you’d expect.

Ignite events have spread around the world helping geeks share their ideas. Google has been a big supporter of getting the word out about Ignite and is hosting its third Ignite at I/O. For the first time ever we are going to be in a keynote room and will be streamed live – so tune in from 5-6 PM PDT on Tuesday, May 10.

Here are the speakers for Ignite I/O 2011.

Kyle Machulis (Nonpolynomial Labs) — This is your brain. This is your brain on bugs.

What do our biometrics say about our code quality, and vice versa? Can health hardware be a debugger for more than just health?

Matt Cutts (Google) — Try Something New For Thirty Days

What happens when you try a bunch of 30-day experiments? Many succeed, and even the failures are over in 30 days.

Pamela Fox — No, Really, I’m Shy

People are often surprised to find out that I am really, really shy. I figured that out when I was a kid and have spent my life coming up with workarounds for my shyness, and now I want to share those hacks with all of you.

Monica Rogati (LinkedIn) — Tiger Moms, Ninjas, and Chips, Oh My! Uncovering the Story in the Data

100 million LinkedIn profiles. Career histories going back to the ’70s. The data tells stories — how do we hear them through all the noise?

Patrick Davison (Know Your Meme) — Avril Lavigne; or How Global Warming Taught Me Why YouTube’s Important

The study of global climate change has created a number of techniques for making sense of the incredible amount of data available. To what degree can the same methods of statistical analysis be used to make sense of another data dump: every comment ever left on Avril Lavigne’s YouTube videos?

Kevin Marks (Salesforce) — Ownership is the Enemy of Control

The history of technology is strewn with examples of attempts to make software behave like property. Some are temporarily successful, but all are ultimately fragile.

Joseph Pred (Burning Man) — Risk Management at Burning Man or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Risk.

Fun has become sanitized by amusement parks, but a sense of risk is a key part of vivid experiences. Risk management, if done right, can mitigate danger while preserving the essential participant experience.

Annalee Newitz (io9) — Social Media Is Science Fiction

In science fiction, social media spawns hive minds, thought control, privacy mutation, and secret revolutions. Do you want to live in the future you might be building with your platforms and apps today?

John Adams (Twitter) — Speak into the Mic: A History Lesson

The microphone has been around for nearly 200 years, yet people still have problems using it. Where did microphones come from, how can you use them to sound great, and where can they take you?

If you’ve never seen an Ignite talk before you can watch hundreds on the Ignite Show site. If you can’t make it to Ignite I/O, then you should find a local Ignite or start your own. If you’ve always wanted to give an Ignite talk (or really any other talk) then listen and learn as Scott Berkun explains How and Why You Should Give an Ignite Talk.

However, the Android community is feeling growing pains. There are issues of fragmentation, new application stores, and new players. Google has shown a willingness to take control of the OS and drive toward a more unified experience, but it must balance that control with the Esprit de corps of the ecosystem. As the community grows, there needs to be a place for it to come together and communicate. Google I/O serves this purpose in the spring, but with a rapidly changing marketplace and frequent OS updates, a year is too long to wait between gatherings.

To that end, this fall O’Reilly is launching Android Open, the first “big tent” Android-only conference. Our goal is to give all the Android players a place to become a community. The call for proposals for the conference is open today. Share what you know about app development, the Android platform and the business and marketing of Android apps.

Android Open is the first conference to cover the entire Android ecosystem, from building and marketing Android apps to what goes on under the hood. It is the single place for developers, IT pros, business decision makers, and marketers to share ideas and insights about the power of the Android platform.

One of the goals of Android Open is to spotlight technologies, people, projects, and companies that point to Android’s future. It is an opportunity for you to learn, hear, and extrapolate on what Android’s future might look like. By bringing the community together we hope to provide a framework for all interested parties to set the path.

Android Open is going to be chaired by Marko Gargenta and me. Marko is a well-known Android community leader and the author of our new book Learning Android. (And in case you don’t know who I am, I co-started Ignite and I co-chair the Web 2.0 Expos and Where 2.0.)

The conference will be held Oct. 9-11 at the Hyatt on Embarcadero in San Francisco. There will be workshops on Oct. 9 and keynotes and sessions on Oct. 10 and 11. There will be three tracks: App Development, Platform Development and Marketing & Business. We will have app and hardware showcases during the event as well.

If you would like to speak or show off a project then definitely submit a proposal to our call for proposals, which will remain open until June 1. Registration also begins today and we are offering a special Google I/O price with the code “lucky13” — it’s good until this upcoming Friday the 13th.

The pictures of a place informs you about that location. They provide context. Bloom’s brand-new Cartagr.am uses Instagram’s new API to do just that. Cartagr.am creates a map out of geolocated images. If you squint you can see the six populated continents above.

Like any good map-based app, Cartagr.am lets you explore at a local level. As you zoom in to an area new photos appear and sizes shift. Unsurprisingly, Austin looks a lot different from Seattle. The images and their relative sizes are selected based on interestingness.

Cartagr.am’s platform shows the Stamen roots of the founders. From their blog we learn that it:

… was written using ModestMap.js for the tile mapping and SimpleGeo for the location services and the labels are the Acetate labels from FortiusOne and Stamen.

The fact that an app this rich is all in JavaScript is just amazing. ModestMap.js allows for broader mobile browser support than a Flash-based mapping framework, and it supports multi-touch for a potential iPad version.

Bloom is a not-yet-funded startup headed up by technology veterans. The co-founders are Ben Cerveny (Frog Design, Ludicorp, and others) , Tom Carden (Stamen Design), Robert Hodgin (Barbarian Group — see some of his beautiful work at Flight 404 ), and Jesper Andersen (Trulia).

They recognize that we are all drowning in a sea of data. Their goal is to make interacting with that data a beautiful and pleasurable experience. The tools they’ll create will (hopefully) be accessible to anyone, regardless of technical skill level.

Cartagr.am is not the only geo-related Instagram app. Instabam will show you photos near you (via instagramers.com)

Cartagr.am is a great visualization tool and it captures the diversity of Instagram photos across the world. However, it’s missing the activity of Instagram, which is is clocking ~6 photos per second. I want to see photos appear and change size as their interestingness score changes.

Tom Carden is speaking at Web 2.0 Expo SF in a session entitled “Data Visualization for Web Designers: You Already Know How to Do This.” Save 20% on Web 2.0 Expo registration with the code WEBSF11RAD.

Where 2.0 — April 19-21 in Santa Clara, Calif. — will features lots of associated sessions, including Raffi Krikorian’s workshop on “Realtime Geo Data.” Save 25% on Where 2.0 registration with the code WHR11RAD.

At Ignite London 2, Tom Scott told the story of a Flash
Mob Gone Wrong. We edited it for the Ignite Show talk from last
week, and it’s struck a nerve and is gathering a lot of momentum over
on Reddit, MetaFilter and Twitter. Enjoy the video and then
read the short interview with Tom Scott below.

What was your inspiration for the talk? Was there a real world event?

Tom Scott: I first had the idea a couple of years
ago, and tried to write it as a short story – which was dire! It
needed to be much more visual and fast-paced, and the rigid format of
the talks at Ignite — 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide — seemed like
a much more interesting way to tell the story.

One of the inspirations — other than the actual flashmobs and
Internet stalking taking place around the world — was Larry Niven’s
1973 novella “Flash Crowd.” That did involve a network of instant
teleportation booths rather than the Internet and cell phones,
though!

Why did you feel it was important to tell this story?

TS: The alternative was not telling it! I was
trying to entertain more than anything else.

Why did you choose to create a fictional event vs. a real world
event that was almost sensational?

TS: “Mob” is deliberately a worst-case scenario, a
perfect storm. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong, in exactly
the way needed to further the plot! The real world doesn’t generally
work that way, and there hasn’t been one massive event like this yet.

Why did you choose Ignite as your medium?

TS: Because it was there! It’s also handy to have
a framework to fit into. I had to pare the story down to only what was
necessary, and that made it a much better tale.

What did you use to make the talk? Did you follow the “Ignite format”?

TS: Quite a few people have asked that! The
“slides” are actually a pre-rendered video made in After Effects; if I
flubbed a line or missed a cue, there was no way to recover! And yes,
it follows the Ignite format — there is one cheat where I have two
blank slides in a row, but even then there’s technically a topic
change when the timer bar resets …

I’ve read some criticism that this talk is fear mongering because
it is a fictional story. Personally I think that the talk is
brilliant (and not just because of the delivery and fluidity of the
presentation). The point of the talk is that these events could happen
in a perfect storm and that we wouldn’t be surprised by it. It’s a
modern-day parable.

The talk is a work of near-future science fiction and is no less
valid because it is done as a performance than if it were written in a
book. Tom is not trying to warn us away from technology, but prepare
us for its implications.

Each Ignite event has a series of five-minute talks. The constraints of the Ignite format — each talk is accompanied by 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds — adds something extra. It’s a boon for the audience because presenters realize they need to prepare and rehearse to keep up with their slides, and that leads to well-thought-out talks.

Last year, Global Ignite Week was in 67 cities. More than 600 five-minute talks were given on 6 continents. I expect this year we will reach 100 cities.

Ignites are community-run geek events (O’Reilly is really just the shepherd, Ignite would be nowhere without the support of communities around the world). Starting an Ignite is a great way to build community and hear new ideas. Contact us if you want to join up for Global Ignite Week — by starting, attending or assisting with a local Ignite event.

Participating cities and countries

Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Anchorage, AK
Ann Arbor, MI
Atlanta, GA
Bend, OR
Berlin, Germany
Birmingham, AL
Boston, MA – Ignite Spatial
Brisbane, Australia
Bristol, UK
Brussels, Belgium
Bucharest, Romania
Cheyenne, WY
Cincinnati, OH
Costa Rica
Dallas, TX
Denver, CO
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Lansing, MI
Lisbon, Portugal
Madison, WI
Manila, Philippines
Medellín, Colombia
Mumbai, India
New York, NY
Nicaragua
Oporto, Portugal
Panamá
Paris, France
Pensacola, FL
Petaluma, CA
Philadelphia, PA
Phoenix, AZ
Raleigh, NC
Rochester, MI Ignite Automotive
Santa Fe, NM
San Francisco/Bay Area, CA
Seattle, WA
Sebastopol, CA
Silicon Valley, CA
Sioux Falls, SD
Sydney, Australia
Vail, CO
Warsaw, Poland
Waterloo, ON
Wellington, NZ

Here’s the full press release announcing Global Ignite Week 2011.

This year I’m welcoming a co-chair to the stage. Laurel Ruma, out of our Cambridge, Mass. office, is going to be working on the program and she’ll be on-site with me. She’s most recently been working in the Gov 2.0 area. In that role Laurel works with various groups, including Code for America, the Boston Urban Mechanics Office, and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, to brainstorm, provide updates of the Gov 2.0 ecosystem, and create a bridge between the technologist/developer and government communities. Laurel was also the co-editor of our book “Open Government.”

A lot of the innovation in location has been on the back of government support (GPS and TIGER data are examples). Laurel will bring her contacts and support to the Where program, and she’ll also be available to meet with companies on the east coast.

At the next Where 2.0 (April 19-21, 2011), we’ll look at the trends that got Google to rethink its location and mobile strategies. As Battelle notes in his post, “location is a key factor in the future of search, social, commerce, and media.” We’re going to examine those intersections and hear from the companies and people that are making the future happen.

The Where 2.0 call for proposals is open until October 25. Submit your talk idea now. Below I’ve included some of the main areas we’re expecting to cover this year.

Location

New technologies enable a level of data collection, retrieval, and analysis never previously possible. Every data point, from what songs are most popular on a particular block to the coordinates where you last bought coffee, can now be used to guide strategic business practices.

Mobile

Mapping and mobile technologies are joined at the hip, and developers have recognized that “There’s gold in them thar phones!” Companies in the Where 2.0 space are betting smartphone users will share their locations and that they’ll make gobs of money with that data, fueling the mobile platform war. As society makes a shift in privacy — or lack thereof — consumer expectations for products and services will also adjust accordingly.

Social

Thanks to the smartphone, location has gone social. This allows users to communicate, connect, and share in new ways through powerful applications, notably Facebook Places, a seemingly innocuous feature that brought location-sharing — and privacy concerns — to 100+ million people, simultaneously. Companies are also relying on open data sets. Who will be testing the social-location limits next?

Sessions and workshops

Where 2.0 will have sessions and workshops on:

• HTML5 — A location app needs a map. The release of JavaScript mapping frameworks Polymaps and Cartagen prove that modern browsers and HTML5 can duplicate Flash, and that geo apps can be built. Is this the next killer tech?
• Data Collections — Mobile apps are not just about check-ins, they’re about users and data. With more users comes more realtime data, and with more data comes the ability to get even more users via better services.
• Users vs. Features — Location apps are often so powerful, users don’t always understand what’s being done with their data. Services have to protect their users. Who is doing it successfully and what are the cautionary tales?
• Public vs. Private — Geodata is often a fact. This house is here. This person was there at this time. But just because it’s a fact doesn’t mean it should be public. Or does it?
• Ads vs. Subscriptions — Location apps need to make money and the business model debate continues to rage about the best way to go about it.
• Interfaces — Augmented reality is the interface du jour, and there is always a 2D vs. 3D debate.
• Future of Mapping — Maps are the heart of Where 2.0. There are new imagery, recording, and collection technologies that will change maps in the coming years.
• Government & Humanitarian — Location, mobile, and social technologies are being used to save lives and open governments around the world. Look no further than the use of Ushahidi in Haiti to see a successful example.

On Wednesday night, September 29, we’re going to have 30 startups demoing in one large room. You’ll have 50 minutes to check them all out and vote for your favorites (we’ll sound a chime every five minutes, letting people know it’s time to circulate). At the end of the hour, Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media Inc.) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) will each announce their top pick along with the audience favorite. These three startups will then each give a pitch and have an on-stage conversation with Tim and Fred. The showcase is sponsored by .CO.

And without further ado here’s the list.

• Aprizi
• Beebuzz
• CiviGuard, Inc.
• Credit Coach, Inc
• Diaspora
• Entrustet
• food52
• Glympse
• Honestly Inc.
• hour.ly
• HowAboutWe
• Intersect
• Itizen
• Lifesta
• MindSnacks
• Naama Networks
• NabeWise
• Ninite
• Outlier
• Parsely
• Roadify Inc.
• SaneBox
• SocialFlow
• Starling
• StorageByMail
• Tactical Information Systems
• Taskforce
• The Comet
• The Social Bicycle System

The program for the Web 2.0 Expo NYC is complete. We have sessions for Developers, Designers, Marketers and Biz Dev. We have added more speakers including Katie Couric (CBS News and talking about the future of journalism), Drew Curtis (Fark and talking about online ads), John Gruber (Daring Fireball, but talking about Apple), Tom Hughes-Croucher (Yahoo! but talking about Node.js) and Eric Meyer (Complex Spiral, but talking about HTML5).

Radar readers get 20% off with the code radar.

If you want to speak at the next Web 2.0 Expo SF our CFP is open until 9/20. Let us know what’s on your mind.

Related:

• How to fix online advertising: Interview with Drew Curtis
• Why HTML5 is worth your time: Interview with Eric Meyer
• Tom Hughes-Croucher interviewed at Velocity 2010

SimpleGeo, geo cloud services and data provider, and Stamen, creators of many beautiful data visualizations, have teamed up to release Polymaps. Polymaps is an opensource Javascript mapping framework. It’s been on Github for a while, but they are finally announcing it.

Out of the gate, Stamen has also launched a great example application, PrettyMaps, combining Natural Earth, OSM and Flickr layers. The effect is, well, pretty. Here is the continental United States at zoom level 3:

And here is Los Angeles at zoom level 8:

Stamen explains that they use the following data sources:

All the Flickr shapefiles rendered as a semi-transparent white ground on top of which all the other layers are displayed.

Urban areas from Natural Earth both as a standalone layer and combined with Flickr shapefiles for cities and neighbourhoods.

Road, highway and path data collected by the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project.

The creation of Prettymaps was much easier due to Polymaps and was almost entirely the handiwork of ex-Flickrite, now Stamenite Aaron Straup Cope. Previously, combining these layers together would have been possible with a GIS system or using custom flash, flex or silverlight code — none of which would have been viewable on an iOS device. PrettyMaps is still a bit too CPU-intensive for it to function well on mobile devices, but as Tom Carden (Stamen) put it in IM “at least there’s a path”.

This is not the first chunk of geo code that SimpleGeo has opensourced (just go check Github). They are in the business of selling geodata and geo cloud services. By releasing these tools they make it easier for companies without geoexpertise to get hooked on their services. As SimpleGeo opens up it’s market and takes on more customers we’ll see that happening. Along the way it’s a great benefit to the mapping and mobile commmunity.